


Complicity

by lazarus_girl



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-15 20:15:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazarus_girl/pseuds/lazarus_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In her early thirties, Quinn Fabray, former shining star of the CIA, has been retired. Uncertain as she makes the makes the leap back to civilian life, she reconciles with her past, her tumultuous career, and the many people who crossed her path.</p><p>
  <em>“The easiest place to hide is in plain sight.”</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Complicity

**Author's Note:**

> AU. Written for day six of Faberry Week (Assassins). Inspired by the John Mayer song '[Assassin](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP4cpVzw_Lc%20)' and draws influences from _Léon_ , _Spooks_ , _Alias_ , _Hunted_ , and a fair bit of research too. References other characters and romantic pairings, but Faberry remain the focus. I really enjoyed putting the characters into this world, and although it’s somewhat dark, I hope you guys do too. A Quinn character study, and something of an experiment in writing style. Click [here](https://24.media.tumblr.com/4bd6932da470ab43bc86ebd7f818466f/tumblr_n3opuaOxM01txkikoo1_500.png) to see the accompanying art. Thank you, as ever, to [cargoes](http://cargoes.tumblr.com) for her beta skills and cheerleading.

***

 _“Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you._  
 _Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.”_  
― Richard Kadrey, _Kill the Dead_.

***

She's ruthless, cold, and efficient, that's why they chose her. She's got steady hands and a straight aim, that's why they keep choosing her. She thinks in missions and objectives, not people, not feelings, that's why she's the best operative in the agency. All of those things are why she wanted out. In becoming agent Quinn Fabray, she lost Lucy Agronsky in the process. She's not sure it was a good trade-off. Changing her name was the last choice she consciously made by herself, barely out of Harvard, lauded as their best recruit, working for the greater good in pursuit of the truth.

The intervening decade has taught her that the line between good and bad is paper thin, and readily breached.

Today is meant to be the day she starts the rest of her life. She’s sitting in an unmarked car on the driveway of a safe house in an anonymous Connecticut suburb; all tree lined avenues, white picket fences, and freshly mown lawns. Everything she owns is newly bought and fits in the trunk of her car. Everything she could possibly need to live her new life undetected sits in an envelope on the passenger seat. It’s the last thing her handler, Will Schuester, gave to her. He’s one of the people who she’ll never see again, not in the official sense, anyway.

The easiest place to hide is in plain sight.

Not many people get to push the reset button, but she has, and more than once. If she was keeping score – and she is, Langley recruited her for her aptitude for languages and logistics first, her skill with weaponry and self-defence came later – this is her eleventh new life. It’s the first legend she’s lived under that isn’t a well-constructed lie. Outwardly, she’s gone from being just another Army brat, to just another Stepford wife. It’s the kind of domestic bliss her mother always extolled the virtues of, but Quinn always thought it to be rather tyrannical. Now, it doesn’t seem nearly as banal. She finds herself craving the mundane. Living – surviving – the extraordinary loses it’s lustre after a while. Shock and repulsion become relative. They have to become relative once tasked with taking someone else’s life. There’s rationale to it, of course – politics, threats to national security, threats to the agency, plain threats. They’re all neat euphemisms for the same thing. It’s fear, really. Fears people never like to name but like to be dealt with quietly. Underneath it all, she’s still murdered people, at close-range, in cold-blood, without a moment’s pause. She isn’t certain about a lot of things anymore, but her moral bankruptcy is comforting in its own way, purely because it means she knows, without any trace of doubt, what she’s capable of. Boundaries and borders are conceptual; easily overstepped in time. They’re a flimsy belief. A belief that can be shaken if given cause, just or not.

(She’s capable of more than that shy, studious college girl ever thought possible).

No one knows anything about those in-between days or anything about the parallel lives she’s led. Parallel lives mean parallel deaths too. She remembers them all. How they began, how they ended, every tiny detail. If required, she could turn on a dime and switch between them, changing her hairstyle as frequently as her accent. It’s all there, stored away, from her first mission as Parisian student Camille Beaumont, to what became her last, White House aide, Zoe Miller. If nothing else, she can say she went out on a high. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, she doesn’t really exist, but her file at Langley still does. It lists her accomplishments, test scores, every report she’s ever written; the proof of all she’s done for her country, that records a decade and change of service that remains mostly unblemished. In the end, that’s what matters. That’s how she has to justify everything. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t sleep at night (even if she’s helped along by pills).

Maybe it was because she was good at her job, maybe it’s because she was foolish enough to do as she was told, she’s not quite sure.

People say that her job is dangerous, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it _was_. She can’t get used to thinking about it in the past tense, but she knows it’ll come in time. All behaviours are learned. This is just something else to acquire. Remembering is a difficult skill for most people; their minds are naturally transitory, foggy, and fallible. Hers is sharp, painfully sharp, like a steel trap. Forgetting is the only thing she can never learn. It’s her weakness. She makes allowances, gives herself a longer leash, but sometimes, she wonders if she’s giving herself enough to be hung. The knots her memories tie her up in certainly pull themselves tight enough to do it.

There were difficult missions, like her time in Moscow as Larissa Anatoly, shortly followed by Romy Lanner in Vienna, that tested her in every sense of the word, pushing her each time, deeper and deeper undercover. She found that she was most comfortable as a field agent, adept at blending in, reading people and their patterns of behaviour. The agency liked that she looked like an unassuming, innocent girl next door, a pretty face. Over time, she learned to outgrow the shy awkward girl she was in high school. With more training, she learned that not all weapons were ones that fired: her body was a weapon, her charm was a weapon, but being desired was the biggest weapon of all. Love was the most powerful weapon in her arsenal. She became confident in her own skin, bold enough to play along with the men and women she was tasked with following. It was the easiest lie to maintain. There was always a layer of remove. She never truly fell in love with them, probably because they too were in love with an idea of a girl, rather than a real girl.

In hindsight, she can see what Schuester, Director Ryerson, and her other superiors were doing, they were readying her, building her up for more complex missions. The best agents are the ones that work seamlessly and autonomously. Your worth to the agency is always correlated to your usefulness. Loyalty means nothing. Trust means even less. The agency is a framework, not a support network. They give her the tools and the technology; she’s the one who has to know how to use it. The time for handholding and babysitting is incredibly short. She learned that the hard way in Barcelona, when she became Ariana Fuertes, and her cover was blown. Everything spiralled out of control, and she was left with no other choice but to kill the person who could betray her. It wasn’t like shooting targets at the rage. The recoil was surprisingly harsh, and her aim was terrible.

She was trained to be clean, sharp, and where possible, silent. Everything is geared toward remaining invisible. That day, she was none of those things. She still remembers her name, and she still sees her face. They crossed paths frequently during her secondment in Barcelona, and they sometimes worked together, since they were both chasing the same goal. They became allies; friends of sorts, but it would cost them both dearly. Her first kill was Santana Lopez, undercover agent for the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia. It still haunts her, because they weren’t even any of her intended targets. They just got caught, quite literally, in the crossfire. Though it was against protocol, she stayed with her until the very end, and watched, half horrified, when her call to Schuester resulted in a clean-up team, and agent Lopez disappeared with a ruthless efficiency that she herself would have to embrace.

It was a hard lesson, but not the only one she’s been forced to learn. Maria Bruzzi, and Rome, became her punishment of sorts – though it was presented as reward. They saw something in her decisions; potential and possibilities that she couldn’t fathom (she still can’t). Shortly after her debriefing, when all the paperwork was in order, she was placed with another agent, Jesse St. James (living under the legend Nico Minnelli), who was essentially a hired gun, to learn everything he knew. He knew a lot, and by the time she returned to Langley, she’d acquired a whole new skillset. Under his tutelage, she became something entirely different. She became, when required, an assassin, and a good one at that – commended for it when she romanced rebel fighters and rogue operatives to wealthy businessmen and women – slipping into the role with terrifying ease. She was a true femme fatale, like she read about in the noirs and potboilers her father was so fond of, only it was real and she got paid for it. The missions, the cities, and the years blurred into each other.

People are naturally drawn to her, and fall in love with her easily – conceited perhaps, but no less true – though warm and giving, she’s a naturally cautious, somewhat guarded person, which proved beneficial as a agent, but less so as a human being. It means she falls in love less easily, and her affection is often misinterpreted. She’s hurt people. She’s broken hearts, and she’s not proud of that, but it comes with the territory. There have been people in her life that she thought she loved and things that came startlingly close to it. People like Sam Evans, the sweet boy next door who she went to high school with. Noah Puckerman, the rebellious frat boy who brought out her mischievous side (she misses him dearly sometimes, but staying in contact wasn’t an option). An unexpected fling with an MI:5 officer, Adam Crawford, while she was working as Kate Williams in London. A rather ill-advised affair with a BND agent, Cassandra July, in Pullach, when her mission to gather intel became rather more complicated, because Claudia Bauer as she was known then, happened to fall in love with her. It didn’t end well. Cassandra should’ve been a lesson to her; she should’ve seen the warning signs. She was seduced and trapped in the same way she had lured other people. Without warning, the hunter became the hunted.

People who love her also get hurt in other ways. Ways she has no control over. Ways that made the last shred of trust she had in the agency whither and die. Tangiers was her second longest posting up until that point. She was Emmanuelle Atias, undercover in the American Legation, and fell for Blaine Anderson, the son of an American diplomat; one of those wide-eyed college boys who want to see the world and rarely go home again, forever in search of something more. Their romance – and it _was_ a real romance – would change her life completely, and not in the way that ends with a wedding march. Unknowingly, she placed a target on his head as well as her own. There’s no easy way to die, she knows, but there are more painless ways than a hail of bullets. Just when she thought there was nothing worse to come, the interrogation and the waterboarding arrived. It wasn’t the first time; of course, she carries her fair share of scars, but nowhere has been quite as nightmarish those days. In the worst of it, she refused to give in, and when they had no other use for her, her captors left her for dead in the Sahara. Just as he always did when things went south, Schuester swooped in, and scooped her up like one of his children.

Though Tangiers has the distinction of one of the darkest turns her personal and professional life has taken, Emmanuelle isn’t the parallel life she remembers with the most clarity. Whenever she’s alone at night, teetering on the edge of sleep, she thinks of her time as Emily Stark, and the loft in Brooklyn, the slick routine that approached something like a normal life. That life, and that woman was most like herself. Most of all, she thinks about the person whom she shared all of that with: Rachel Berry, the only person who knows her completely and the only person who she’s ever fallen in love with in the real, honest sense. After Barcelona, Cassandra, and the horror of Tangiers, she didn’t intend to get so closely involved with anyone, much less another agent, but she didn’t intend to meet anyone like Rachel either.

New York was her longest posting after Tangiers, her check-ins with Schuester were few and far between. She supposed they were easing her back in gently and letting her recuperate by putting her with a more experienced agent, even if they were relatively close in age. They wanted to keep her as a company girl, and she wanted to prove her worth, but if she’s honest, she doesn’t think she ever fully recovered. Neither did her career. She was out of the reach of Langley and unmonitored for so long, that the agency became less and less important. Her priorities stated to shift. Maybe she lost herself, broke rules she’d always promised she’d follow, but what she gained was greater. In theory, her role was to observe and monitor movements, just like her early missions. In practice, she had a shot at being ordinary, just for a while. It was the calm before the storm of Washington, and she looks back on it as one of the rare happy times in her life.

They began their journey together as Emily Stark and Marissa Michaels, an architect and a Wall Street analyst. They ended it as Lucy Agronsky and Rachel Berry, lovers, deeply connected in every sense. The attraction was instant, right from the moment she saw Rachel, or rather, Marissa, on the subway platform waiting for her to arrive. Secretly, she wondered if the legend of them being close college friends would be hard to live up to. Chemistry is, she knows, incredibly difficult to fake, but she needn’t have worried. She thinks back on her and Rachel’s early, understandable caution with a strange fondness, just because it signalled how easily they would fall in synch with each other, how their guard slowly dropped over time, and true friendship blossomed and they reached a point where they were comfortable enough to reveal their true identities. She remembers distinctly how strange it felt to say her real name out loud; the syllables foreign in her mouth and on her tongue; her voice weak and rusty, yet thick, as she made the admission. It was no great confession, but more a natural part of their changing dynamic. They both felt it; that invisible yet palpable tension between them. Progressing from friends to lovers was simple, easy, and inevitable – a choice, and yet, not a choice at all.

The outside world got Emily and Marissa; behind closed doors, they were Lucy and Rachel.

They worked hard when they needed to, logging activity from the warehouse across the street, keeping watch in shifts, but part of their job was also to maintain the illusion of being young professionals. Schuester encouraged them to go out, to make friends, and build a convincing social network, so they did. She can still hold her liquor better than most people, and her senses are always sharp, so even when they were meant to off duty, they never really were. If she were an easy drunk, she could’ve blamed the kiss, and their night together that quickly followed it, on that, but her mind was clear, and she was stone cold sober. It just felt like the right thing to do. Just once, she gave in, and followed her heart, the heart of Lucy Agronksy, and let Rachel Berry steal away, night after night with soft whispers and softer touches. No one’s ever treated her like Rachel does. Being wanted and desired is common, but being loved – honestly and unconditionally, as Rachel loved her – is a rare, precious thing. It was passionate, sensual, everything you imagine about a genuine love affair. She learned things and she felt things that she never thought possible.

For the first time in her life, she’d met someone she could trust, felt the same about her. When circumstances forced them apart; Rachel to Paris and she back to Washington, her status as an assassin had been restored, but she still maintained her cover in an ‘ordinary’ job, finally putting her political science degree to some sort of practical use. This was apparently for her own protection. All the while, she and Rachel kept in touch, using their New York legends as cover, mailing correspondence to each other that got dropped off to post office boxes they made sure were untraceable. The separation and the longing was hard for her to deal with. Before now, the end of a relationship was always severed completely, by death or something equally final, but now, her connection to Rachel stretched elastic between the miles that separated them, and try as they might, they could never end things; no matter how many times they tried. Months could pass before she’d see another letter when she opened the box, but still, they’d come, and the cycle would start again. She didn’t look at anyone else, and spurned the advances of anyone who showed interest in her. Rachel’s letters spoke of much the same.

Their time in New York had made them greedy. They could make love for hours, or just lay naked in bed and talk, holding each other as they mapped out impossible futures. What was once something so treasured was reduced to stolen kisses and fumbles in bathroom stalls and thin-walled seedy motel rooms where their release was borne out of frustration rather than pleasure.

She remembers Rachel in close-up: her face lit by a bright smile; the deep, dark warmth of her eyes; lashes against cheekbones; her full lips, slightly parted and waiting to be kissed; the way her hair would fall, just so around her shoulders; the slope of her neck; the elegant curve of her back; the softness of her kisses; the salt of her sweat; the indescribable bittersweet taste of her; her content moans of pleasure; the shallow, hitched breaths right before she came; the arc of her back off the mattress; the bed linen crumpled between her closed fists; Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, drifting from her mouth like a mantra, a prayer, and a promise at all once.

The mark Rachel made was indelible, and their closeness would be her undoing. The agency used her weakness against her.

Part of her always knew what would happen. That the delicate balance of imagined safety they’d created would ultimately shatter, but she never once thought that she would be the one to deliver the hammer blow. She had long since grown disenfranchised with the agency and wanted out. Schesuter said it wasn’t possible; she was just too valuable. What he really meant was she knew too many secrets and was too good at telling lies to keep them. Resigned to the fact she had to keep on going, and there was no other option, she focussed on her work, thinking that was the end of the matter. It was only the beginning.

The mission started out like any other, a packet containing her objectives, and a photograph of the target, and the date and time of the hit. As soon as she read the word Paris, she knew what was coming. She would make her trip week early to take a job monitoring the city’s security cameras, falling back on her investigative and logistic skills to make it realistic. Her true focus would be on Jardin des Tuileries, where the pair where her target was scheduled to make a drop. The file listed the woman as Giselle Laurent, but she knew her to be Rachel Berry. The agency believed she had been turned and was selling information, working in partnership with another agent called Luc Durand (someone she knew from recruitment cycle training as Brody Weston). The two, the file said, were in a romantic relationship. At first, she didn’t want to believe any of it, reeling from the betrayal she felt, but ready stand up and question things, no matter the repercussions, but things were not as they appeared.

On a rainy, cold Sunday night Schuester approached in a blacked out car, and made her get inside. This was a test, straight from Ryerson. They wanted to know where her loyalties truly lay. They knew the truth about New York, and she was under suspicion too. Schuester promised that if she pulled the trigger, thus proving herself again, she would get to walk away, gifted an entirely new life, cutting all ties from the agency. Unofficially, she was being retired. Officially, any trace of her would no longer exist. It was made clear to her that any semblance of choice was off the table. He was making a deal; they were bending the rules to breaking point. If it went wrong, the buck stopped with Schuester. Their relationship had passed that of just agent and handler long ago, and she was torn between being faithful to him, and faithful to Rachel.

In the end, she had to be faithful to herself. She had reached her limit. It was kill or be killed. She got her freedom, but she paid the ultimate price for it.

She doesn’t regret many things, the time for morality and right and wrong is long gone, but she regrets Rachel. It’s a heavy guilt, like the guilt for Blaine, and Santana Lopez, but worse, sunk deep into her bones like the biting cold on that November night in Paris. She had spent her week preparing, watching the city and Rachel on the cameras, seeing first-hand the sight of a woman she still loved beyond words, looking at Brody Weston with the same kind of reverence she had once reserved for her. Rachel was good, but not good enough. There were obvious tells to suggest she wasn’t quite as in love with Brody as everyone else seemed.

The end, when it came, was as quick and painless as anyone could hope for. When she approached Rachel, there was a calm air of resignation about her. There was no protracted oversentimental goodbye speech. Rachel understood, seeming as if she knew it would happen and made no attempt to fight back or flee. It was the easiest, cleanest shot she ever took, straight in the heart. Afterward, she allowed herself to hold Rachel, and kiss her one last time, before she called Schuester to arrange the clean-up team. She watched, bleary-eyed, fighting tears as the van containing Rachel’s body sped off into the night. The tie she fought so long to maintain with her had been severed, brutally, but there wasn’t anything like closure to accompany it.

The last exchange was one-sided, and contained just six words: “I hoped it would be you.”

Those words have resonated with her, from that day to this as she went through the motions of debrief and evaluation with Dr Holliday, and her final meeting with Schuester, where he slid the legend package across the table. Another six words came, ones she hopes she can live by:

“Live for you. Make it work.”

With a heavy sigh, she disguises the legend packet in her handbag, striding up to the house with newly-dyed blonde hair – as close to her natural colour as it’s been in years – new designer sunglasses, dress, and shoes. Another agent is already here, a companion, to help her adjust to civilian life. It’s not exactly what she’d want, given the choice, but the company might be nice. She takes a deep, calming breath, and pushes her doorbell, just once, stepping back and checking her reflection in the glass while she waits for it to be answered.

“I hoped it would be you.”

For long seconds, she thinks her mind is playing tricks. It can’t be Rachel. She watched the van, she went to the funeral, she saw the casket and the mourners. It doesn’t make sense. It just _can’t_ be her, but it is. The girl – woman – she thought she’d lost forever is alive, has been waiting for her all this time, right in front of her, casually dressed, barefoot, her hair in a messy bun, wearing that same warm beautiful smile she remembers so well, like nothing’s changed between them at all. She’s reduced to an incoherent mess as she tries to make sense of it – knowing in her heart that suddenly Schuester’s words make a lot more sense. He did this for her, for both of them – babbling half-formed questions of what, how, and why, when she realises that none of that really matters at all, because Rachel is alive, whether she’s been duped or double crossed or triple crossed so they can be together again, Rachel is alive. She shakes her head, tears streaming down her face as she pulls Rachel toward her, holding her far too tightly, and before she realises, they’re kissing, full and deep. They shouldn’t be doing this, not so publicly, but she can’t help herself, and neither can Rachel, hands threading into her hair as they keep kissing, Rachel guiding them into the house – their home, together, is all the can think vaguely, as the door slams behind them, closing off the real world and their old lives with it.


End file.
